Essay On American Foreign Policy From The 1890s To The 1980s

Before World War II, the U.S. was not a superpower and in fact chose to refrain from playing a truly global role after participating briefly but decisively in World War I in 1917-18. It refused to join the League of Nations that had been the brainchild of President Woodrow Wilson and in the Great Depression of the 1930s signaled in advance that it would not participate in another world war by passing a series of Neutrality Acts. Only with the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 and the massive mobilization that followed did the U.S. finally become committed to a globalist foreign policy. There was no ‘return to normalcy’ after 1945 as there had been after World War I, and for the next four decades the U.S. was committed to a policy of containment against the Soviet Union, starting with the Marshall Plan and Truman Doctrine in 1947. Eventually this policy was applied on every continent, with the most disastrous consequences during the Vietnam War in 1965-73. After a relatively brief period of détente with the Soviets in the 1970s, though, the administration of Ronald Reagan in 1981-89 waged the Cold War with renewed intensity, at least until the Soviets themselves called a halt to it.
Starting with the Spanish-American War in 1898 and the conquest of the Philippines in 1899-1892, U.S. interventionism was often overt and direct, usually just a matter of landing troops on the shores of some prospective banana republic and installing a ‘friendly’ government there. This is exactly what happened in Hawaii, Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic, in some cases more than once. In overthrowing democratic governments and supporting corrupt and pliable elites in Asia, Central America and the Caribbean, economics was almost always the real motivation. This pattern of intervention in Latin America and Asia continued during the Cold War, all the way up to the covert wars against Nicaragua under the Reagan administration. The U.S. used covert or overt action against governments such as Guatemala in 1954, Cuba in 1960-62 (where the CIA failed to dislodge Fidel Castro), Brazil in 1964, the Dominican Republic in 1965, Chile in 1973 and Nicaragua in the 1980s. At times, though, the friendly authoritarian regimes simply failed and no amount of American support could prop them up. South Vietnam was the most dramatic American failure of the Cold War, where not even 555,000 ground troops, massive bombing with everything in the arsenal short of nuclear weapons—more tonnage dropped on Indochina than during the entire Second World War—and unlimited economic aid, were able to salvage the client regime the U.S. had established there after the French withdrawal in 1954.
During the Cold War, as the hegemonic superpower, Western Europe and Japan revived under American auspices in the 1950s and 1960s, to the point where they became economic rivals. The U.S. also organized multinational institutions to promote order and stability, such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Southeast Asian Treaty Organization (SEATO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank and General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), renamed the World Trade Organization in 1995. From the period of the Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan in 1947 through National Security Memorandum 68 in 1950, the U.S. was attempting to expand its system worldwide, at least outside the Soviet Bloc and China, wherever such expansion was possible. The U.S. had already been a typical imperial power since the 1890s by the time the Cold War began, and certainly its foreign policy supported free trade, open doors to American investment and various capitalist interests, but before World War II it had only been a regional imperial power rather than a global superpower.